KG51 losses on 23 August 1942.

[Andreas Brekken]

Hi.

Could you please point out the inconsistencies for me?

Regards,
Andreas B

[Nikita Egorov]

Dear Rene, Andreas and Brian,

Thank you very much for the input! As I see the issue with von Bibra is not clear for the moment.
Let me explain, researching the Stalingrad battle in the air deeply, I came across some cases that puzzled me a lot and made me think that some of the GQ loss returns are not complete and mistaken for this period. August 23, is one of the cases. According to Soviet documents, fighters made around 50 claims against different German planes through that day. Officialy only two planes one from 9/KG55 and another from stab I/St.G77 were reported as jagerbeschuss. However, I saw the interrogation protocole of Fw. Fritz Gammel that bailed out in the vicinity of Srednaya Achtuba and was taken POW. Although he states that the reason was "motorschaden", there are vitnesses that his Bf-109 was shot down by Soviet fighter.

The origin of the second case also comes from the interrogation protocole. This time of Uffz. Rupert Holzer from 3(H)/12 that came down on August 14. He describes the attack on the airfield Bereska on August 12 by a group of Sturmovicks that copletely obliterated 3(H)/12, more than 15 planes were destroyed or severely damaged, thus making 3(H)/12 to withdraw all the safe planes from this forward airfield and put the proup out of combat for several days. As far as I know (maybe wrong? still not have the full info) this case is not reflected in GQ lists.

Many other cases can be found while matching with Soviet side. My general question is if it is possible that groups, suffered lots of redeployments, ecpecially from one Lftflt to another thoughout august-september 1942 could report losses incorrectly or simply drop some without reporting. It concerns e.g. II/JG3, II/JG52, III/KG4...

TIA

[Andreas Brekken]

Hi, Nikita

I think you might be on to something, even if I do not believe the reason is that it was not reported by the units 'on purpose'.

I have found several documents lately regarding the regime used for reporting losses in the Luftwaffe, and will put together an article on this issue during this winter.

The thing is that there were to channels for reporting, and one was it seems better with regards to consistency (or maybe I should say stricter), namely the losses were personnel losses occured.

I will come back to it later.

With regards to the specific case on 3.(H)/12, is is of interest to note that the loss record for said pilot WAS registered, and in fact as the last loss record for this unit. I do however also believe this interrogation report to be incorrect with regards to the fact, maybe a translation problem? as the strength report of said unit would leave it with no more than 9 aircraft in total at any time during August 1942, of which 4 seems to have been lost/damaged during this month. The natural conclusion to me is that there must have been more units at the airfield mentioned, and that Holzer reported that a TOTAL of more than 15 aircraft were lost/damaged during this attack, and probably some of the 3 aircraft lost aside his own during this month where one of them. Another possibility is that some of these aircraft mentioned were (at least som of them) MENT for his unit, but still officially not taken over from for example the depot organisation which were transferring them. Another distinct possibility is that the losses were reported under some dubious makeshift unit designation and that we yet have not 'found' them. (The unit did exist for some time after this, but invariantly known for example as Aufklärungsgruppe Fleischmann)

Interesting topics, we will have to discuss them more.

Please do not hesitate to send more specific data my way if you want me to look at it from the German side.

Regards,
Andreas B

[Pawel Burchard]

Originally Posted by Nikita Egorov

Officialy only two planes one from 9/KG55 and another from stab I/St.G77 were reported as jagerbeschuss.

Nikita, according to III./K.G. 55 KTB only He 111 H 6 (7401) G1 + DT was lost on 23/Aug/1942, it was hit by Flak and later finished up by fighters.

regards,
Pawel

[Andreas Brekken]

Hi, all

The only thing I have stated and others with me is that the GenQu 6 Abt loss lists IF units did their job, and IF no records were lost due to enemy action, technical problems or other reasons SHOULD HAVE BEEN COMPLETE.

Franek dismiss them as statistical data - have you ever seen or worked with these lists at all?

What I have been trying to get to, and probably will continue to do with parties more interested in getting data out than flogging their own horses (or making politics out of it), is that we cannot, in any instance just assume that the typical 'but some guy in an infantry regiment say that he saw this aircraft being shot down and thus since he was from the soviet or western allied forces this must be what happened'.

Please submit the name, rank, unit and date of the incident for your friend Franek, and we will see what we can find. There are several sources to look at if one wants to.

The idea of these lists are entirely clear, as stated in the wartime documents covering their use and the formation of them from an archivist point of view - the lists we have are MENT to be complete. They are not - due to reasons we already have covered.

My best tip is then to do like a lot of people have done for years - don't assume them to be entirely complete - ( but at least they make a data foundation that in any statistical means wouls be considered as significant) and try to clear the cases you discover that have discrepancies by using other sources! And they are there! In most occupied territories, maybe with the exception of the former Soviet union, there are local police reports, town histories, remnants in museums etc etc etc. Harder to find and requires work, but it is possible in many cases to add to the story we already have, or find new information if it is there.

And if the russian government havent been able to hide it entirely in their new archive system for the great patriotic war, the former NKVD reports on downed enemy aircraft should be available to researchers.

OK, got other stuff to do now, but I do believe that the best way to move forward is to stop discussing if the data we already have is more or less complete, and try to do an effort to complete the picture with relevant data.

Regards,
Andreas B

[Franek Grabowski]

Andreas
It is not making politics, just a warning that every such documents by definition are prone to errors, and whenever possible, should be cross-checked. This is understandably quite hard, as there are no daily flying and servicing logs for German units nor even Form 541 equivalent.
I have seen excerpts of some periods of GQ6 lists, and generally they do not impress me too much. I have several Polish AF documents, partially doubled by RAF ones, and assuming that the bureaucracy is similar (especially as there were several ex-German/Kaiser army people in Poland), I see several fields for possible gaps.
I do not know if your database allows that, but it would be interesting to compare eg. numbers of losses combined with personnel, total losses without any injuries, and damages for units operating in the same general area. Eg. it was my impression that there were substantial differencies between reports of various Luftwaffe units during the BoB. There are some cases, where it seems reports were send in batches and misfiled under wrong dates (so well known for all Form 78 fans).
You say that the one must be extremely careful with observations of Allied servicemen. Indeed, but they should not be dismissed as a whole. One case that comes to my mind is on 3 May 1942. During Circus 154-4 Northolt Wing clashed with II/JG26. In ensuing combat two parachutes were seen, one of them was no doubt the solitary loss of the Wing, thus the other one must have been German, but it is not reflected on any losses known to me. There are some more similar cases. By the way, it is noticeable, that during the Spring of 1942, there are not too many loss returns of German airmen bailing out.
Oh, and the one must be careful with ground reports too. I have a ROC message stating that two Me 109s crashed in 1940, while actually they were not!
In regard of my friend, apart of his account, I have a relevant page from his log book. I need to dig it out from my archive, not to provide wrong data. I have a Wast excerpt provided by him, and he is not listed among the losses, despite his wounds that postponed his service for few months.

[Nikita Egorov]

Rene and Pawel,

Thank you very much for info!

Andreas,

Let me correct you. Lots of reports on downed German planes were issued not by NKVD, but by different comissions that visited crash sites, starting from regimental staff personel to different technical man and others. Although it was a major task of security officers. The later are by now secret and the first can be found in open documents. Thus, I see reports on Volkmann and Kuhn from III/JG3 that landed and their planes captured without any damage, Hans Hahn, Beerebrock, etc.

[Andreas Brekken]

Hi, Franek

There are daily flying logs for German units, on several levels (airfield logs, unit KTB's, commanding units KTB's, liason officer operations listings etc etc etc). The problem is that a vast amount of this documentation was lost during the war, and that (probably) a vast amount of it is still misplaced or misfiled in different archives both in Germany and in the allied occupying forces home countries.

In addition, a lot of files were both destructed (the Luftwaffe seems to have been better at this than especially the Kriegsmarine) close to the end of the war, while other files were simply destroyed due to enemy action (during the air raid I mentioned before, when a storage facility of the war history department was hit by bombs, this basement that was partially destroyed, contained amongst other items: 20000+ files form Legion Condor, 87000+ files from operational units).

Look at the WASt files for JG 5, several of them have burned edges due to the fact that these files were damaged due to bomb inflicted fires.

I think we should come to some kind of consensus on this, and accept that we have documents that are as good as they possibly could be given the circumstances, and try not to hammer each other on the head in a political battle, but rather try to clear any discrepancies by providing documentation for each other in thos cases.

Regards,
Andreas B